LifeItself

First the good news. Lacking leadership, guidance and resources, most of my fellow Americans are stepping in, wearing those masks and practicing social distancing. Here in Texas, Governor Abbot abandoned pretending that he is a blind fool, and ordered mandatory masks, $250 fines for not wearing them (including a text message on my phone from the Texas disaster warning system), and bar closures. The Houston Medical Center, where I recently went, looked like a ghost town. We need to think a lot harder about reopening schools, rather than bars. In my Hayes county, practically everyone wears masks in stores, even in Home Depot, whose pro-Trump CEO does not seem to get this simple message: if you care about the economy, wear a bloody mask and make sure that together we will not be overwhelmed by the fear of the virus, and will resume sending our children to school, visiting doctors and dentists, start flying, visit hotels and  frequent outdoor restaurants. Right now, this broad attitude is

As I am writing this blog on May 29, 11:30 m CST, I have 20 more days of the highly erratic corona virus death data from the US, Germany and the world. Over 100,000 Americans have died of the corona virus infections in not quite three months since the early March of 2020. I do not know how to process this tragedy, other than to say that most of it could have been avoided, if we had a different administration in Washington and we had not been mining literally every resource, including humans, over the last 40 years. The merciless virus has illuminated every wrong we have committed over several decades, including that terrible murder by the police in Minneapolis this week. Coming from Poland and knowing what I know, the detached behavior of the four police officers who committed this particular crime was reminiscent of the WWII German soldiers milling about the countless execution sites for men, women and children, while being filmed by their comrades. Or taking a photo with a freshly

Normally, I never write blogs every three days, but here I go. Since I am a scientist, not a politician, my quantitative assessment will be based on a careful analysis of the available data. The bottom line of this blog is shown in Figure 0 .  First, there are all incremental deaths in the US over and above German deaths multiplied by four to scale the German population to the size of the US population (the blue curve).  Second, for the reasons described below, one can subtract 1/3 of the US deaths that occurred in nursing homes.  These deaths have been caused by 40 years of neglect and the horrific state of the US for-profit industry that mines old people. The remaining 35,000 incremental deaths in the US (the red curve) can be attributed to the disastrous policies of the federal government under Trump.  That's nearly twelve 9/11 body counts in the US, with more to come. Figure 0.  The excess deaths in the US compared with German deaths multiplied by four to account for

Well, friends, many things have happened since my last update of April 21, 2020.  I should advise the more sensitive readers to skip this post, because some of the language and content may be unsuited for their delicate taste buds. Earlier today, I listened to and watched on Zoom an excellent seminar given by a friend from the Imperial College in England.  The esoteric subject of the talk was how surface charge and rock-oil-brine interactions limit or help oil recovery from difficult reservoirs.  The audience consisted of about 110 people from the Imperial College, Edinburgh, KAUST, Oxford, TU Delft, Yale, and several Chinese and US universities, and companies.  It was all great and would not warrant a report in this blog, were it not for the fact that in the last two minutes someone hijacked the computer of one of the participants and "bombed" our meeting by posting a video of a young white man rubbing with his erect penis the genitals of a 4-6 month old baby girl. I a